A selection of weekly articles by top Bahamian commentators.

August 01, 2016

If you’ve ever been curious about the history of mental health in the Bahamas, pick up a copy of Dr John Spencer’s new book—From the Crazy Hill to Sandilands.

I should add that it’s not a history - although it includes a lot of historical background. And neither is it an autobiography - although it recounts personal stories.

The book records some of the experiences of a young doctor in the Bahamian health services half a century ago—first as a medical officer at the Princess Margaret Hospital and later as a psychiatrist at Sandilands.

Now in his 80s, John Spencer qualified as a physician in 1960 and married his high school sweetheart - Pat Denison - in their home town of Sheffield, England.

Within weeks they were in Nassau, after John was recruited by Chief Medical Officer E. H. Murcott. But in 1964 - at the PMH out patient department - he had an epiphany, after witnessing the arrival of 20 mental patients from Sandilands for routine chest x-rays.

"It was at this moment that I first became acutely aware of that unexplored and neglected branch of medicine called psychiatry,” he wrote. "As I helped each patient in front of the x-ray machine, I was suddenly possessed by an intense curiosity to know more about those who were afflicted by these strange illnesses.”

A few months later he left Nassau for postgraduate training in psychiatry at the University of Sheffield. He returned in 1969 to work with the legendary Dr Henry Podlewski at Sandilands Hospital.

Podlewski (who died last year at the age of 94) was a fascinating character and a true medical pioneer in the Bahamas. As a student in Warsaw, he experienced first-hand the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, which started the Second World War.

He and many others fled the country to join the free Polish forces led by General Władysław Sikorsky in France. Podlewski and other Polish troops were deployed to the Middle East, under French and later British command.

Later in the war, the Polish government-in-exile encouraged young professionals to finish their university training, and Podlewski ended up at the University of Edinburgh as the war came to an end, rooming with a friend named Stan Pogonoski.

After the war, Pogonoski’s English wife became secretary to Sir Robert Neville, who was then governor of the Bahamas. And in 1956 Pogonoski invited Henry to join him in Nassau.

This was a marvellously serendipitous event for the Bahamas. Podlewski was the first qualified psychiatrist ever to practice in the Bahamas. And he was instrumental in transforming mental health treatment in the country and planning the first psychiatric hospital out east.

Before 1956, disturbed patients were confined to a prison-like compound on a rise adjacent to the old Bahamas General hospital. At the time, it was a popular pastime to climb to the top of the water tower for a good view of the lunatics on the “Crazy Hill” below.

Another of Spencer’s psychiatric colleagues back in the day was Dr Tim McCartney, who wrote a popular book in the 1970s called Neuroses in the Sun. It contained his personal recollection of the Crazy Hill as a teenager, which Spencer repeats in his book.

“They were nearly always screaming, hurling obscenities, banging their heads against the bars, or pathetically shouting for help and imploring people to release them. Occasionally boys would throw rocks at them, egged on by amused onlookers.”

It was Podlewski who almost single-handedly changed all this - supervising the transfer of 140 ‘Crazy Hill’ patients to the new 200-bed Sandilands Hospital at Fox Hill. The move coincided with the advent of new drugs for mental illness, and the introduction of psychiatric training for local nurses.

According to Spencer, "Henry exercised great patience and skill to gradually transform the old asylum-style practices into a modern psychiatric service. He educated the public to regard patients as curable rather than lunatics who had to be locked up forever. He also played a major role in drafting new mental health legislation."

One of Spencer’s most intriguing tales about Sandilands features a delusional Haitian migrant who believed he was possessed by an evil spirit sent by a powerful zombie in Haiti.

in April 1971 something unusual happened — for no apparent reason his Haitian patient made a sudden overnight recovery, assuring everyone that something “very good” had happened.

Newspaper headlines the next day reported the death of President Francois Duvalier, or Papa Doc as he was called, at the relatively young age of 64. Duvalier had ruled Haiti for 14 years with the help of voodoo priests.

“He had actually died on the very day of Willie’s unexplained recovery,” Spencer wrote. "This was an incredible coincidence, and when I showed him the newspaper headlines, he grasped my hands and said: 'Oui, oui. I know. Very good, very good.'”

Spencer left The Bahamas just prior to Independence, and practised in Canada, France, England and Australia - where he eventually settled. He has published widely in medical journals and is the author of two books on psycho-social topics.

He contributed to the development of mental health services in rural areas of Western Australia and for indigenous communities. He has also been a hospital superintendent, director of the Western Australia Alcohol and Drug Committee, and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Western Australia.

Until recently, one of his three adult children - Matthew, who is a Bahamian - was a teacher at St Andrew’s School. He now works in Myanmar (Burma).

•From the Crazy Hill to Sandilands: Reflections & Memories of a Psychiatrist in The Bahamas, by Dr John Spencer. Published by Media Enterprises, 2016. 100 pages.

August 25, 2015

Last June, a gunman walked into the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina and shot nine people to death at a prayer meeting. The shooter said his goal was to start a race war.

Pictures of the shooter draped with a Confederate battle flag triggered widespread controversy in the US. In the years following the Second World War, this 'southern cross' flag was flown as a symbol of resistance to racial desegregation. It was used especially by the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist group that targeted blacks.

The Charleston massacre led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, where it had flown ever since 1961. As most people know, South Carolina was where the American Civil War began a hundred years before - when the state's militia shelled a US army garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour.

The bloody war that ensued was fought purely over the issue of slavery. The constitutional compromises reached at independence, which had allowed slave- and non-slave-holding states to co-exist, broke down when the anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860.

There can be no doubt about this. South Carolina's secession document clearly notes that, "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the states north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of president of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

October 23, 2014

The unravelling of Dr Arthur Porter’s life didn’t begin in the Bahamas. But it could be said to have ended here - more or less.

Porter is a leading cancer specialist. He became an international lobbyist, and an advisor to Bahamian, American, Canadian and African political leaders. His business dealings stretched across continents, and heads of state were his colleagues and friends,

He now resides in a Panamanian jail, fighting lung cancer as well as extradition to Canada on charges that he arranged $22.5 million in kickbacks, paid to Bahamian shell companies, during construction of a $1.3 billion hospital in Montreal.

Before his world collapsed three years ago, Porter had been the jet-setting chairman of the Canadian Security Intelligence Review Committee. He had served on a US presidential healthcare commission, had been appointed chairman of the Bahamas Stem Cell Task Force, and was a goodwill ambassador for Sierra Leone, the country of his birth.

September 28, 2014

My reading list recently has included two personal memoirs by individuals connected to the Bahamas.

Hermione Llewellyn was born to a wealthy Welsh family, which her father bankrupted by gambling when she was only 13. Leaving home in 1930, she got a job selling appliances, and later became a typist.

In 1937, she went to Australia to work as a secretary in the colonial administration (must not have been many typists in Oz back then), and met Daniel Knox, the 6th Earl of Ranfurly, who was an aide to the governor-general. They married two years later.

The Ranfurlys spent most of the Second World War in the Middle East and North Africa, where Dan - an officer in the 7th Armoured Division - was a prisoner of war for three years. In October 1953 he was appointed governor of the Bahamas for three years - on the aristocratic dole.

After he died in 1988, his wife published a memoir of their wartime experiences. And when she died in 2001 at the age of 87, their daughter, Caroline, published Hermione…the Continuing Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, which covers the three years that her husband was governor in Nassau. Part proceeds from the book go to the Ranfurly Home for Children, which Hermione helped to establish in 1956.

As one reviewer noted, "The day-to-day concerns of domestic life and the constant visits of the same circle of friends can seem banal”. However, there is much in this book to interest the general Bahamian reader. It is a fascinating snapshot of life seen from the top of the social food chain just before everything changed.

October 14, 2013

Counterfactual history is an attempt to answer hypothetical questions by considering what would have happened if certain key historical events had not occurred. Such speculation has spawned an entire book genre, which seeks to understand the relative importance of the event in question.

Science fiction writers are very fond of counterfactual themes, but serious historians have also been unable to resist the temptation to ask 'what if?' In 1931, for example, Winston Churchill contributed to an anthology called If It Had Happened Otherwise. His essay examined the course of events if Robert E. Lee had won the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War.

Julian Granberry, the veteran Florida anthropologist and linguist who contributed decades of scholarship on the extinct Lucayan Taino inhabitants of the Bahamian archipelago, has produced his own alternate history titled The Americas That Might Have Been: "a book I expect practically everyone to find some fault with" as he says in the preface. "My hope is that everyone will also find a great deal that is new, interesting and useful."

In this 2005 work, Granberry attempts to answer the question: What would the Americas be like today—politically, economically, culturally—if Columbus and the Europeans had never found them, and how would these American peoples interact with the world's other societies?

It assumes that Columbus did not embark from Spain in 1492 and that no Europeans found or settled the New World afterward, leaving the peoples of the two American continents free to follow the natural course of their native lives.

February 19, 2013

Following hard on the heels of his earlier book - The Migration of Peoples from the Caribbean to the Bahamas - Bahamian Keith Tinker has come up with another scholarly page-turner, entitled The African Diaspora to the Bahamas.

Tinker, 57, is a historian who led the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation from its inception in 1998 until 2011. Before that he was a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance and the Department of Co-operatives, while teaching part-time at the College of the Bahamas. He holds history degrees from West Indies College in Jamaica, Florida Atlantic University, and Florida State University.

In this book, Tinker has compiled information on "the story of the origin of the black masses into a comprehensive, thematic work." A project, he says, inspired by research carried out in the 1990s by two former attorneys-general - Sean McWeeney and Alfred Sears - as well as conversations with Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, a former lecturer at the College of the Bahamas.

The book opens with an overview of the African slave trade. Between 1650 and 1860 as many as 15 million enslaved people were transported from West Africa to the Americas. And from the 9th to the 19th century millions more were dispersed throughout Asia and the Middle East. The African Diaspora refers to the movements of these people and their descendants throughout the world.

December 04, 2012

Sawmill SinkThe rocks that make up up the Bahamas platform were formed over millions of years in shallow water as layers of sediment. As these layers gradually subsided under the weight of new deposits, they were converted into limestone.The top layers were blown into vast sand dunes, and by the end of the last glacial period - about 12,000 years ago - the geography of the Bahamas was more or less complete.

But during the ice age, when sea levels were much lower, rainwater had eroded the limestone rocks to form solution holes that gradually expanded into huge underground cave systems. These were described as early as 1725 by the great English naturalist Mark Catesby, while the marine caves known as blue holes were first recorded on sea charts in 1843.

In fact, the entire Bahamas platform is riddled with cracks and fissures like the holes in a piece of Swiss cheese, and everything is tidally connected. One of these fissures is called Sawmill Sink - an inland blue hole in south central Abaco that extends 150 feet below sea level, and then spreads out into miles of horizontal passages. Scientists have spent the last several years investigating a treasure-trove of fossils found in its depths - all perfectly preserved by the cavern's unique water chemistry.

According to top cave diver Brian Kakuk,"These systems hold hidden but vital historical data on our past global climate, giving benchmark evidence of past sea levels. They are not simply holes in the ground in which to throw things, but precious containers of potable water and rare marine life - time vaults of Bahamian history and generators of tourism revenues."

Kakuk has more than 2000 exploration cave dives to his credit, and he is one of the lead investigators in the Sawmill Sink Project, having found the first fossil there in 2004 - an extinct giant tortoise. Later investigations in this undisturbed cave have turned up a range of impressive fossils - the prehistoric reptiles, birds, and mammals that once roamed Abaco.

So far, the research team has recovered the bones of 54 land crocodiles - including some that lived 4500 years ago - as well as several giant tortoises, who lived contemporaneously with the crocodiles and often served as their prey. Among the fossils are bones from a Lucayan child dated to about a thousand years ago - the earliest evidence for human occupation in the northern Bahamas and the oldest radiocarbon date on human bone in the entire archipelago.

"We are also finding lots of bones of birds, snakes, frogs and lizards," Steadman said. "The whole fauna of the last few thousand years before people arrived in the islands and caused many of these animals to become extinct. We are finding a similar species composition to the present, so we will be able to put extinction into perspective over time."

November 06, 2012

A group of top scientists descended on the College of the Bahamas last week for a symposium to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a monumental book on the Bahamas. However, it's a safe bet that most Bahamians have never even heard of that book, much less scanned its pages.

The publication being honoured was Flora of the Bahama Archipelago, authored in 1982 by the American botanist Dr Donovan Correll and his wife Helen, who spent seven years collecting plants throughout the islands. Their 1692-page tome includes hundreds of painstakingly drawn pen and ink illustrations by Priscilla Fawcett. Publication was sponsored by Miami's Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Founded in 1938, the Fairchild Garden is both a world class visitor attraction and a centre for education and research. From the plant exploration done in support of the Correll book, Fairchild developed the most extensive living collection of Bahamian plants outside of the islands. You can see them today in a three-acre plot just off Old Cutler Road in Coral Gables, where more than 138 species collected from the Bahamas are happily growing.

The Correll book superseded the first comprehensive record of Bahamian plant life. The Bahama Flora was produced in 1920 by Nathaniel Britton of the New York Botanical Garden andCharles Millspaugh of Chicago's Field Museum. It described more than 1900 species that had been collected over the two centuries since Captain Thomas Walker sent the very first specimens of Bahamian plants to England in 1703.

September 16, 2012

Edited by Larry SmithIn 1952 Paul Thompson was recruited by the Royal Bahamas Police Force in his native Trinidad. One of his early postings was to a special squad assigned to raid the Numbers houses. Thompson was a legendary detective who rose through the ranks at CID to become an assistant commissioner of police before retiring in 1981. Since then he has been a security consultant. Now 85, Thompson is about to publish his memoirs. The following extract from his forthcoming book - A Policeman's Story - describes a dramatic encounter with the equally legendary Numbers boss, the late Talbot "Stokes" Thompson. The encounter led to a blazing shootout on Mackey Street - most unusual for the time.

From A Policeman's Story, by Paul ThompsonThe Numbers racket has been widespread on New Providence for many decades. In my day, Bahamians bought numbers from street vendors, or in bars and petty shops over-the-hill. Some number sellers visited offices, shops and other businesses to provide custom service.

Buyers would choose a number (often based on their dreams) and the vendor would give him a piece of paper with his number on it. The seller would record the name of the buyer in a notebook for reference when the draw was made. This differed from the present-day operations, in which the numbers are drawn outside of The Bahamas, usually in the United States, and all of the administrative work is done by computers.

Back then, the Numbers houses held the draws locally - except for the Cuban lottery, which was drawn in Havana every Saturday and broadcast over Cuban radio stations. There were three main Numbers houses on New Providence operated by very wealthy men - Talbot Thompson, Percy Munnings and Eugene Toote.

Apart from their Numbers houses, Thompson and Munnings were known to be involved in heavy personal gambling, often winning or losing small fortunes in a single night. In later years, Father Allen, a well-known restaurant owner, established a fourth Numbers house. All of these men are now dead.

January 18, 2012

Last Friday marked the 54th anniversary of the 1958 general strike, one of the seminal events of the modern Bahamas. On January 13 of that year hundreds of public and private sector workers walked off their jobs, shutting down New Providence for almost three weeks and forcing some much-needed social and political change.

The key labour leaders of the time are no longer with us, but both have left behind a rich legacy in the form of their personal memoirs. Those leaders were Sir Clifford Darling, who died last month at the age of 89, and Sir Randol Fawkes, who died in 2000 at the age of 76.

Sir Randol's 1977 book, The Faith that Moved the Mountain, gives his personal (and what historian Michael Craton described as "somewhat self-serving") perspective as a leader of the Bahamas Federation of Labour, the umbrella union which called the strike. A memorial edition is available online at http://sirrandolfawkes.com.

Sir Clifford's 2002 book, A Bahamian Life Story, provides much of the background necessary to form an appreciation of this unique event. In addition to his personal perspective as leader of the Taxi Cab Union, which instigated the strike, his account includes secret communiques from the colonial authorities, as well as contemporary newspaper reports.